


Ricochet

by prestonsarchives (orphan_account)



Category: Carol (2015), The Price of Salt - Patricia Highsmith
Genre: !!!, Angst, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Self-Harm, actually not even implied/referenced self-harm okay it's very unambiguous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-17 14:48:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28601724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/prestonsarchives
Summary: Carol and Therese — their reunion. Except.Except it's sixty years later.Except it's an alternate universe.Except they didn't meet in a department store, but a bookshop.Except it hasn't been one year; it's been seven.This is a story, but it is not the one you know.
Relationships: Carol Aird/Therese Belivet
Comments: 8
Kudos: 37





	Ricochet

**Author's Note:**

> Right. My other, longer Carol fic — it died a death. I've orphaned it, so it'll be in the ether somewhere, I think. In any case: this is quite a heavy one. Trigger warnings are in the tags, so please read them before you start. Not quite sure what else to say other than to add that I'm... considerably proud of this, so comments would be really appreciated. Much love, and happy new year to all.

* * *

_and I can go anywhere I want_  
_anywhere I want (just not home)_

_–_ my tears ricochet, ts

* * *

The lamplight stains the edges of Carol’s notepad a dull yellow, pen clutched in shaking fingers to the side. This is a start — this has to be.

_Dear Therese_ , she writes, and then she writes the name again, falls into it, over and over and over until her wrists ache with longing, until her heart weeps for seven lost years. _Dear Therese,_ and her thoughts are filled with it until the letters stumble across the paper in an unintended anagram.

DearesT here.

Dearest, here.

_Dearest,_ and this time the word feels right. It’s perfect as she cups it in her palms, soft and humming and just heavy enough to make her think.

_Dearest._

The letter stretches on.

_Dearest._

_Seven years ago, today — I let you down. It was a build up, from what I can remember; all of those faults of mine stacking themselves into towers that I made it your job to navigate around. You deserved the freedom you gave yourself, and I know that now. The things I feel for you, still, thousands of nights passed; I can’t write them in a letter. It would be a disservice to all of the poets that came before us — it would be another excuse._

_Time heals all wounds, and yet. You, Therese. The exception to the rule. For every year that we spent apart I want to give centuries back, for all of the lifetimes that felt thus passed. To put it bluntly — and here, my walls tumble entirely down — I miss you. You will have changed, and the likelihood is that your memories will have grown with you; these seven years have been a sixth of my life, and simultaneously just a quarter of yours. You were young, Therese. And I know you hate to hear this, I know; but you_ were _young, and naïve enough to think some part of me was fixable by extrinsic hand._

_It breaks my heart, even now, that that same part of me would not allow itself to be fixed._

_I was so scared of loving you too much, just as I did Rindy — and losing you — that I dared not admit to myself that I loved you at all. The irony still shatters dreams of mine, that in my fiercely blind protection of all I had left, I lost all I had to love. I can’t say the words here._

_We were two broken people, and in each other we found solace, safety enough from the shards of jagged glass. There has never been a happy ending for us, the antiheroes — if there were ever gods, perhaps they are the only beings who know what it was to be as ignorant as we. Seven years, though, and I have fixed myself. As I promised to. This isn’t a plea, just a fact — all that is left from me, is you._

_To you, and the quarter-life you have now lived without me, I may well just be a faded memory. You might not even remember my face — though I can assure you, age has carved valleys into me. You might not know me at all. It hurts to think about, but maybe even reading this letter you’ll have to run through a list of exes until you reach my name at the bottom, all of the people who, at some point, will have been dearest to you. I just. I just wanted you to know — though this may not even make sense — there have been no more dearests. Not for me. You came, and you stayed, I’m afraid._

_If you have even bothered to read this far — we are nearing the end, I promise. I write this on a Tuesday, and I’m sending it to your address in the vague hope that you might still live in the same place._ _If you get this, if you remember me, if it’s not too much of a hassle, if you even want to, if you don’t hate me, if and if and if and if — I will be in our bookshop at midday, in exactly a week’s time. Nothing more than that, because I can’t hurt either of us so much as to beg for you back._

_And if you don’t come, for whatever reason. I’ll understand. Seven years of me, will understand._

_Let us find each other in the next life._

_Carol._

It doesn’t feel like enough, but she supposes nothing ever will. _Let us find each other in the next life._ The edge of that sentence is smudged with saltwater, so terrified is Carol that Therese will barely remember her, will hate any memory she _does_ have, will never want to see her again. _I think about you, constantly._ She’d wanted to slip that in somewhere, but the opportunity simply hadn’t arrived. If Therese turns up, perhaps the words will fit there.

She thinks about the hollow at the base of Therese’s neck — that imprint, that curve, about the size of the impress of a thumb. Carol feels the way her hand comes up to her own throat, fingers dancing across the empty indentation as if it was Therese, here. _Pull yourself together,_ she whispers.

But she is undone.

* * *

Tuesday rolls around. Doesn’t roll, really — stumbles, trips past the midnight bell and makes itself about as known as a new day can make itself. The undone woman is beside herself, with nerves. There’s an outfit pieced in somewhere, a frantic throwing aside of unworn garments to try and find clothes which she can recall Therese complimenting, makeup after that, a kettle boiled until Carol looks at the time and forgets entirely about the powder in the cafetière. It’s ten in the morning — she has two hours — but nothing can be left to chance.

It’s not so much a blur as a _haze_ that coats the next thirty minutes, a slapdash grey paint job muddying the passing of time itself as Carol presses into a taxi, rests her head against the window and wonders if this could all be fixed with an amnesia-inducing car accident. _No,_ and the word is clear, but the sentiment isn’t — _no_ , as in, _none of those thoughts today,_ or _no,_ as in, _nothing about this is fixable?_ It’s a matter of hope, really, is this whole thing. To be resting every element of the future on something so fragile as hope is probably a terrible idea, but so are most concepts. Terrible ideas are the only ones that ever end up making history.

The bookshop — it has evolved, as bookshops are designed to. New books have rolled in, be they dog-eared or freshly printed, and it strikes Carol that she now has to figure out something to _do_ with herself for an hour and a half without looking either suspicious or just generally questionable. It doesn’t occur to her, however, that a bell behind her will ring just ten minutes after she enters. It doesn’t occur to her that the face she sees as she turns around to glance at this unwanted visitor belongs in fact the only person she _does_ want to run into. It doesn’t occur to her — it’s the last thing to occur to her, to _anyone,_ because change is always heavy like this — how different Therese will be.

Oh, _god._

She’s a vision. Has been, _always_ has been, how _stupid_ was Carol ever to have let her go. Age has carved small enough valleys into the slope of her cheeks that anyone else might not have noticed, but the universe has been over this, so many times. Carol _isn’t_ anyone else. Therese’s hair is slightly longer now, falling just down to her collarbone rather than her shoulders, and the bangs have been grown out. Superficial things, and Carol’s certain that she would be struck this dumb with or without these external changes.

It’s the way she’s holding herself, though. Rather than furrowing up as Therese once might’ve done through a neatly kept fringe, her gaze is as confident as Carol’s ever known a gaze to be. Back straight instead of leaning slightly over, chin tipped slightly up in — in what. Defiance? Pride? ( _Disgust?_ ) She’s a changed person, entirely.

Seven years ago, two pairs of eyes met in a bookshop. A woman who had forgotten what it was to love, and a woman who wanted to learn what it was to live.

Seven years later, two pairs of eyes meet in a bookshop. A woman who _remembers_ what it is to love, and a woman who knows _exactly_ what it is to feel alive.

Everything has changed.

Nothing has changed at all.

“You’re here.” Carol breathes the words, lets them trip and fall onto the carpeted floor as if Therese can simply lean down and gather up the syllables. She’s good, it has been discovered, with broken things.

“You’re early.” There’s resentment there, of course. Not so much a reply as a trained response, years of Therese’s own mind warning her against this exact situation. Carol has drawn herself bare across a crucifix, and it is a certain thing that stones are going to be thrown.

“There’s a lot to catch up on. Figured we could use the time.” It’s cooler than Carol realises she’s going to be, sounds almost sarcastic in the circumstances. The relief that breaks with the smirk across Therese’s face is a welcome emotion.

“How’ve you been?”

* * *

It’s brittle, at first. Small talk, and small talk, and _minuscule_ talk to the point where Carol is forced to fake a shiver and joke about how cold it’s getting. Until, an admission, on her behalf. _Went to therapy. Fixed myself, like I said I would._ Therese’s guilt is visible, audible — _you were never broken —_ but it’s such a blatant lie that Carol has to laugh. _We both were, darling,_ and the term of endearment doesn’t go unnoticed, manifests itself as a deep flush at the base of Therese’s neck.

Carol has moved house — _an apartment, on Madison avenue_ — Therese hasn’t. Therese has got a new job — _a journalist, mostly interviews nowadays_ — Carol hasn’t. Back, and forth, and back, and forth, until.

“There weren’t.”

It’s two words, and as of yet they don’t mean too much, slicing through Carol’s dialogue with enough force to silence her. She waits.

“In your letter. The one you wrote to me, you said…”

She said a lot of things. There is plenty to unpack, there.

“You said the thing about all of the other people who’ve been dearest to me.”

Carol’s heart stops beating entirely, so suddenly that for a brief few seconds there is an utter conviction that this is genuinely the end of the line.

“There weren’t any other dearests.”

Therese looks up, and there’s something so _raw_ there, an emotion stripped back to almost nothing at all.

“Just wanted you to know.”

There is, at least, _one_ thing they now have in common. Carol almost reaches across the chasm between them, almost grasps Therese’s hand and presses it to her cheek, almost wonders if she can feel the residue of _so_ many tears. _Almost._

“Can we leave?”

_Shit,_ because that sounded entirely wrong, and the words came out desperate, and surely there’s no coming back from something so gaunt as that. Except. Except Therese is still looking at Carol with an expression which isn’t anything ranging from disgust to ridicule. Somehow, after all this time, they still understand each other enough that Therese knows exactly what Carol was actually trying to get across — _can we leave,_ but only as in, _can we talk about this somewhere else._

“Lead the way.”

* * *

The walk back to Carol’s apartment — _apartment,_ Therese has to remind herself, because Carol lives in the city now — is as slow and meandering as if the two are involved in fruitful conversation, and yet there are no words between them at all. Madison Avenue is closer to their bookshop than Therese realised, though, and with an unprecedented suddenness they’ve arrived at the destination which is so foreign to the brunette that it scares her. She looks at Carol, though, watches the way her chin shifts slightly up when she walks, hears the way she clicks the knuckle of her index finger every so often, smells the perfume that Carol still wears, has not strayed from.

“You really haven’t changed at all,” Therese says, and it sounds like it’s upsetting her. Her gaze travels the sky, the walls, the ground, the entire scope of every visible thing but Carol.

It’s intended as a compliment, and yet Carol doesn’t know how to take it, noticing as avidly as she does how much that Therese _has_ changed, entirely. She turns, it seems, in the opposite direction to the rest of the world, and leans into the brunette with a tentativeness she hasn’t seen in herself in seven years. Allows herself to press a finger to Therese’s wrist, at last. An eclipse — the sun and the moon, and this is the first time that the universe has aligned for them in so _achingly_ long.

“I stopped smoking,” Carol finally manages to choke out, but her words are frayed and dissolving. _Some things aren’t so easy to just give up._ One of the last sentences she’d ever given Therese, before this, and the sentiment had stretched until it broke. Covered all things, but the women themselves.

There have been tears welling in Carol’s eyes ever since she woke this morning, and yet here, they finally fall, so plentiful that they do not even slip down her cheeks, just drip straight onto Therese’s coat. They ricochet, as all things do. _Look how far you’ve come without me,_ she wants to say, but it teeters on the edge of being condescending and she cannot risk anything. Not yet.

“My love,” she whispers, to herself rather than to Therese — and it is as if something between them shatters. She collapses into her lover, collapses into the _memory_ , and weeps harder than she has let herself in seven years.

“You came back.”

These are the words which break Therese, finally, _finally,_ she brings her arms up to Carol’s shoulder blades, cupping them like flames in her palms. The bones which once met like wings across porcelain — they protrude from Carol’s back, and suddenly Therese is cast into the fear of what she has done to this woman she once worshipped as a god. She ghosts her fingers around to the ridge of Carol’s collar, and the trepidation bursts free from its chains — Carol is a skeleton. Her bones feel as if they are aching to tear from her skin.

“I came home.”

Carol implodes; she feels her whole body bend, and bend, and break. The sentence draws rivulets of blood across her limbs, nailing itself into her, setting fire to all that is left to burn. For the first time, in all of these lost years — it is Therese, holding Carol up. Not a single boundary flares between them — the brunette feels as if she is lifting a puppet, though, a comical shell of a human light enough to entertain. She isn’t quite sure what she means to say as she murmurs the syllables, but it feels right, feels like enough to tie this weightless woman down.

“Inside?”

* * *

The apartment is nothing like Therese expects it to be — nothing like the house she had come to memorise. She runs the dates through her head, and Carol has been living here for six years, now.

_Nothing_ is unpacked. Cardboard boxes litter the floor like memories, and Carol looks down, and away. The apology catches in her throat as Therese breathes into her, shaking her head just enough for the movement to register. _I did this,_ she is whispering, over and over again, and this time it is _certainly_ not meant to be heard — she fears that a shred more of guilt will simply turn the woman she no longer recognises to dust, and she cannot lose her again. She will not. She can’t afford to.

“The bedroom?”

It’s not romantic, not sexual, she just needs to see the damage she has done. Needs to know just how much she can hate herself for all that she is to blame for.

The bedroom is more boxes and a bare mattress in the centre of the room. A desk, and a lamp in the corner, and that is it. Rage, now, and it’s directed entirely at herself. She looks at Carol so as to apologise and takes in the flush in her cheeks, the clenched fists, the shuddering that belies silent tears. This, she realises, must be mortifying. She takes Carol in her arms and it’s as if they float down to the mattress, movements soft and impossibly cautious as both women lower themselves onto what Carol has been calling a bed for _six and a half years._

“Can you…”

She doesn’t want to say it. This feels like scrutiny enough, and here it is as though she is forcing the older woman into some medical examination. Carol, though — she hasn’t known anyone else’s concern in so long. She anticipated disgust on Therese’s behalf and the majority of her sobbing emanates from a place of _thank god she hasn’t left already._ Pain such as this — it is indescribable. All that can be said is that it is an entire flock of emotions, a sadistic swarm of awful things, and through pain it is impossible to see anything else. It consumes you. It consumed _her_. All that was left of Carol, expected Therese to leave again. It was the only thing she knew to foresee. Lovers, leaving — Carol Aird knows nothing else. Silently, desperately, she draws off her jacket and watches Therese’s eyes go wide.

“Please don’t hate me,” she begs, and it is a prayer that reaches into Therese and shakes the essence of all that she is. _How could I hate you,_ she wants to say, but she is speechless.

The first thing she notices, as all broken people do — the scars. They are as abundant here as unblemished skin, some bright and still scabbing over, some long etched into the canvas that Carol has made of herself. Therese wants nothing less than to romanticise the sheer extent of helplessness Carol must have been feeling — but they are just as much a part of her lover now as anything else, and she knows that she’ll learn to love them as readily as she loves Carol, even after all this time. She finds one that looks less recent, so as to avoid the infliction of any more pain, and draws her lips to it, ghosting over the scar with a breath, a kiss. Carol shudders, and both women are reminded that lust remains a factor, and it is dark, and they are lying side by side on a mattress in a dusk-strewn room.

“I could never hate you,” and she blows the sentence onto pale skin, watching the goosebumps rise and fall in the wake of her whisper. _But you hated me enough to leave_ — Carol is mature enough to hold the words back, but the thought is as dangerous in her head as it would be in the air around her. Resentment — it’s a stitch not easily unpicked.

She peels back Carol’s shirt, feels as the blonde tenses, feels as she herself tenses with it. She has long memorised the hills and trenches of Carol’s torso, once marvelling at how toned she was — but this is a dozen steps further than toned. This is starved, empty. These are new ridges she will have to chart, and once again it is the unfiltered guilt of _this is my fault_ that screams at her from ribs that look as if they do not belong where they sit. A cage, and she knows Carol’s heart is in there somewhere, but will that have hidden itself, too? Her eyes rise up from Carol’s chest to the older woman’s own face, choosing to avoid the fact that the irises staring back at her are shades darker than she knows them to be. _Lust,_ and the idea is there again but she brushes it away like a hair on someone else’s blazer.

“Carol…” she begins carefully, but the caution of her words tells both of them exactly where she is going with her next sentence.

“In the desk. Third… second drawer down.”

Gently, as wary of making sudden moves as she might be around a wild animal, Therese pulls herself up, pads over to the desk, pulls open the middle drawer. Sitting in the dark, at the back, a plastic bag, and it is crinkled with use — in it, half a dozen razor blades. If Therese had been anyone else, she might have paused to wonder how something so small could cause so much damage, but with a surreptitious glance down at her wrists, her thighs — she doesn’t need to wonder. There is a dark part of her which simply knows. She slips the bag into her coat pocket before taking the whole garment off, folding it down in the corner since there is no rack to hang it on. She contemplates asking Carol whether or not there are any more blades, but there was something in the candour of her voice before that radiated the presence of the entire truth. A promise.

_Take these — take me_.

On the mattress again, and there is silence as Carol draws a hand up to the salt flats of Therese’s cheek.

“I was so shocked, when you turned up. I thought you hated me.”

A tear drips onto the older woman’s thumb and she hesitates, fingers hovering now just above not-so-foreign cheekbones.

“I was shocked when you wrote.”

They have let the night fall into place around them, but they are in the city now — absolute darkness does not exist. They can still see each other, the strangers, the poets, the lovers, the mourners — and as they always have done, they can still drink each other in.

“Was that all you felt?”

Rumination. It’s a strange noun. An even stranger verb — and here, it runs free.

“Does it matter?”

Carol answers, and her response does not wait.

“Yes.”

Everything matters; nothing matters. This room — it’s the whole universe. The laws of physics don’t exist here — each force doesn’t have an equal and opposite reaction, because there is nothing opposite about what the women feel for each other. They’re floating. That’s the simple fact.

“Then no. That wasn’t all.”

Therese breathes the words — she is closer now, to Carol, can feel the breath dying on her own lips and reviving on the blonde’s.

_What else was there,_ Carol thinks, and Therese watches the way Carol’s pupils swallow out the blue in her irises. She can see herself, reflected.

“There was this.” She leans in, presses her mouth to Carol’s jaw, almost whimpers to be feeling that impossible smoothness after all this time.

“And this.” Therese arches into Carol, aiming to drop an innocent kiss to Carol’s forehead but landing open-mouthed and inhaling instead, desperate to simply _consume_ Carol now in a way that she couldn’t remember feeling before. The older woman stiffens beneath her, and wandering hands find their way to Therese’s abdomen, the line of her jeans.

“And this.” The decision she makes in this moment is clearer than any thought she has had for months, and it’s one that she barely needs to make as Carol leans up and into her, capturing Therese’s lips in something so desperate that both women almost have to pull away. It’s as urgent as she dares to be, and the word that forces its way from her throat is as quiet as she can bear to be.

“ _Therese._ ”

It’s the first time she’s let herself say the name in so long, too long, and her mouth aches for it almost as much as it aches for the bearer of the name herself. She can’t help the way her fingers reach up and tangle in Therese’s hair, feeling her way back down over the territories of this body she hasn’t mapped in what may well be an eternity. A cord begins to wind its way through Carol from the crown of her head all the way to her feet, knotting right in the centre, below her stomach, between her legs.

Therese takes control, now, pinning Carol’s wrists above them both on the mattress and breathing in the moan that escapes her lover’s lips. Fingers, so starved of contact as they are, draw a line from Carol’s jaw to the rise of her breasts, slipping underneath the fabric of a bra, drifting down her torso. The knot tightens ever so slightly — but Carol has not known the touch of another woman for thousands of nights and it’s a matter of minutes until that cord will snap entirely. Carol will tumble over the precipice, breathing, gasping, crying out into Therese’s neck. _Don’t leave me,_ she’ll want to whisper, hours later when she wakes up in Therese’s arms. Therese — she won’t. She’ll never leave again.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos if you can spot my not-so-subtle reference to The English Patient — inspired, I think, by a certain nickname. László; sound familiar? ;)


End file.
